


The Memory of Water

by weakinteraction



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-06
Updated: 2018-10-06
Packaged: 2019-07-25 23:37:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16208045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/weakinteraction/pseuds/weakinteraction
Summary: The further adventures of Bill and Heather, post-World Enough and Time.





	The Memory of Water

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pygmy_puffy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pygmy_puffy/gifts).



In every culture, on every world, the same legends recur. The undine, the naiad, the sea-nymph, the lovers-in-the-water, the spirits of the running stream. Only a few imagine that the myths might be connected, that the similarities between the legends are any more than the age-old phenomenon of convergent cultural evolution.

And yet ...

* * *

"... I'll show you around."

And she does: Bill takes Heather to all the many places she visited with the Doctor, and countless more besides.

As time goes on -- subjective time, for they are freed from the constraints of mere linearity far even more than Bill ever was during her travels in the TARDIS -- they grow in confidence, experimenting with the endless possibilities of their liquid form. They dance through the universe's water, inhabiting cascading waterfalls, and rolling thunderclouds, and giant diffuse clouds in space larger than solar systems.

They spend millennia inhabiting the oceans of a large water world, their consciousnesses expanding to encompass the entirety of their environment ... and each other. And, knowing each other more thoroughly than any two beings ever have, they depart once more to explore ... everything.

They stretch themselves to find the furthest reaches of deep time. There, water is a precious resource, the tiny amounts of it that have not succumbed to evaporation -- the evaporation of baryons themselves, not merely the transition to the gaseous state -- jealously guarded. To their shock, there are humans here, in the megaparsec-long shadows of the dark matter reefs.

But pleasant surprise turns to a dawning realisation that something is very wrong. Someone that Bill recognises all too well is here, though he knows nothing of them yet. It would be dangerous for him to learn more than he should, and the people here are doomed in ways that cannot begin to understand.

They do not stay long.

They push back in the opposite direction, finding the earliest they can go. Before this point there is no water, only oxygen nuclei forged in the unimaginably violent death throes of the very first stars, flung out into a superheated universe, surrounded by ubiquitous hydrogen but not yet bound together with it into molecules. But here now, in one tiny cool patch of the burning universe, a cloud of water has formed, light years across, that is large enough to encode their consciousnesses.

By modulating the shape of the cloud they inhabit, they form a giant lens, an enormous watery eye floating in space, able to see in all directions at once. The early universe is violent, turbulent -- and breathtakingly beautiful. Sparkling nebulae fill half their vision; tiny pinpricks of light behind them like stars in the night sky of Earth, but each is a nascent galaxy, still almost close enough to touch before the cosmic expansion whisks them away from one another.

The Doctor once told Bill that it was the Time Lords who had set the conditions for so many life forms to follow the patterns of bilateral symmetry, of size and form that seem to spread throughout the whole universe. Not through deliberate choice, but through the mere fact of their existence imprinting itself on the cosmos. And yet here they are, earlier than the Time Lords ever reached. Here they are, the animating spirits of the first water ever to form in the universe. Perhaps _their_ residual biological patterns are the ones that set the conditions?

Mothers to a universe. They laugh at the thought.

And still they go on exploring. They are true elemental spirits of nature now, just as the legends paint them, but on a far grander scale than most of the mortals whose lives they have fleetingly touched could ever imagine: they have transcended space, time and form.

And so, having sought their limits, they seek to reconnect with their origin.

There is something of a commotion when they emerge, transparent and glistening, from the great fountain in the central plaza. The people of this world are amphibious, their gills flap in surprise at Bill and Heather's appearance. But communication is quickly established, and the people are undoubtedly friendly, if confused. It takes a few hours before word of their sudden arrival reaches the obscure team who launched the project. It turns out that the people -- in their own language, they call themselves "bordercrossers" -- have no great space program or any desire to expand beyond their comfortable world.

The one and only vessel -- the one that found its way to Earth -- left only this morning. The team who launched it had been celebrating their success, not expecting any results from their experiment for many years.

And as they listen, they understand why the vessel never received instructions, or the pilot it was looking for. Because they had already been here, and explained the need to avoid a paradox. They have already glimpsed the dreadful consequences, at least in part.

They quickly realise that they have long ago transcended these "creators". They bear them no ill will, there is simply little here of anything more than passing interest. They pass a pleasant few days exchanging information walking in the canalled gardens with some of the lower-ranking members of the scientific caste, information that will take each of those they talk to an entire career to unravel. If they had a mission - if the ship that found them had a mission - it has more than been fulfilled.

But their true origin point, the one that their memories track back to, that formed the personalities that have grown and expanded but still remain, at heart, Bill and Heather, is the Earth.

They return there, transformed and yet the same. Earth is the same way: they perceive it profoundly differently, yet they know it is the same. This is where it all began, for them.

"You never did take me on that second date," Heather says casually, as they dance through breaking waves in dolphin forms.

They form the bodies that they have never forgotten, making them opaque for the first time in an uncountable age.

If anyone in the restaurant notices the water dripping down the table legs, they are too polite to mention it. Perhaps they assume that one of them spilt their drink.

Bill ran across the universe, fleeing from what she thought was a monster. Heather ran across the universe to save her when she became one.

And now, they have travelled the length and breadth of space-time, become beings of near-limitless possibility. But at their core they remain: Bill and Heather.

And as their hands reach out across the table towards each other, they know that there is always more to explore.


End file.
